In this year's budget
speech presented to the Parliament on 28 February 2005, our Finance
Minister, Mr. P. Chidambaram devoted an entire paragraph to IISc! Here it
is, in the the subsection titled "Institutions of Excellence":
92. On January 6, 2005, the Prime Minister spoke about his intention to set
up a Knowledge Commission to look into the issue of building quality human
capital. Government believes that investments in institutions of higher
education and Research and Development organizations are as important as
investments in physical capital and physical infrastructure. What we need
are world class universities, and we must make a beginning with one
institution. We must have a university that will be ranked alongside Oxford
and Cambridge or Harvard and Stanford. I am happy to inform the House that
we have selected the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, which
enjoys a high reputation as a centre of excellence in research and
development. We shall work to make IISc, in a few years, a world class
university. I propose to provide an additional sum of Rs.100 crore as a
grant for this purpose.
Here are my views as an IISc insider (I do plan to post my views as a
citizen a little later).
Needless to say, I am thrilled that IISc has been given extra
money, because
I do feel that there are important things that need to be done in our
Institute that cost money -- for example, infrastructure: quality of
electric power, internet connectivity and bandwidth, and housing for faculty
and students. A second and rather indirect benefit is that this
recognition of our academic excellence by our
pay-masters will also help us in attracting good students and good faculty.
This will start a virtuous cycle that could take the Institute higher
and higher still.
After listing some of the benefits for our Institute from this 100 Crore
grant, I must point out here that
I resent the comparisons to Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Stanford. Don't
get me wrong: I have nothing against these great universities.
IMHO, every institution -- ours is no exception -- should constantly
strive for greater levels of excellence, without worrying too much
about where it is in some pecking order. To evaluate academic performance
based on a silly worldwide comparison is just that - silly. Similarly,
I think the sentence about making IISc "a world class university" is also
silly. To me, what really matters is, not whether we are world class,
but whether we make concerted efforts to become better than what we are today
(See [1] below).
Finally, let us turn to this question of how the media and the common folks
have responded to this special treatment of the IISc? I have not
done any exhaustive search, but the print media have been either gushing or
gently positive about our Institute. This
Outlook
story really gushes.
This
story at ZDNet India (originally from Business Standard) says some good
things, and draws important connections between attracting good students,
and the emergence of MNC research centres in India (GE, GM, Daimler
Chrysler, etc). Times
of India, on the other hand, has carried a series of generally positive
short reports about various facets of our
Institute (Sorry, I have only
two
links!
Their website is so poorly organized, I have not been able to get the links to
the others).
However, these Times reports contain egregious factual errors! For example,
one of them said we don't have an electron microscope and the 100 Crore
grant will help us get one! Another gave generously inflated numbers
for (a) our annual expenditures and (b) our research publications! See footnote [2] below.
What about the others, including the common man and woman?
I suggest that you check out
this
blog post by Amit Chakrabarty (and the readers' comments) over at the
Zoo Station and the comments
at the end of the Outlook
story. There
are quite a few negative remarks there. For example, Amit ends the post
with this:
A more meaningful criticism of the IISc is what I alluded to earlier: it's
been far less successful at building its brand name than the much younger
IITs. As a very young prof working far away from India I can hardly lay
claim to knowing the solution but it's clear to me that the 100 crore gift
can only help. For starters, perhaps the IISc would consider hiring someone
to create a professional website for the institute that actually announces this generous gift?
Come on, IIsc! It doesn't take Nobel prize winners to get your website up to Oxbridge standards.
For some (justifiable) envy and disdain among our brethren in our country's
grossly underfunded universities, take a look at this
Indian
Express story (which probably appeared in its Pune edition). Here is
a rather understated quote from this story:
While most agree that it is but befitting that IISc get the first crack at
upgradation, the reluctance in putting a finger on university-strengthening
measures hasn't gone unnoticed.
Let us be clear: all our actions, not to mention our academic performance,
will be keenly watched. Any misstep on our part will be used as a stick to
beat us (and the parties of the present Government) with.
Finally, I hope our Government will get its act together and start
making serious efforts to improve our education system at all levels:
primary, secondary, higher secondary, college and research. Particularly in
the last two categories with which I am most familiar, our Government should
really ensure that institutions, and undergraduate institutions and
universities in particular, get adequate funding to make education at these
levels modern and truly "world class". Now, that is a
goal that our Government should really like!
[1] This editorial Economic Times (7 March 2005; unfortunately, you have to keep clicking
next page, until you get to page 3 that has the third editorial titled
"Style over substance". See footnote [3] below.)
is another example of such
silliness. According to it, the recent achievements of Sania Mirza and
Narain Karthikeyan are all really not worth
celebrating. These editorialist worthies do not seem to realize that these
people have achieved what no other Indian has achieved so far, and that, by
itself, is a great cause for celebration. I would
really pity the sons and daughters of these editors: if they adopt the same
standards in their personal lives, their children are probably getting pained
by them for not doing anything "world class".
[2] For the record,
according to our own internal documents, our budget for the financial year
2004-05 was about 82 Crores of non-plan and 27 Crores of plan expenditures,
and about 40 Crores of externally funded research projects. Similarly, our
publications number about 1200 per year, and is about 10 % of the national
figure for all of India in the fields of science and engineering.
[3] Can you imagine a newspaper website that cannot even separate
individual articles in a day's editorial? Indiatimes does it: it puts all the
editorial articles in one single page; and asks you to keep clicking
"next page". These guys don't know a professional website
from a horse's behind; I promise you that I will not buy their shares
when they do their IPO!